


To Weld and Solder

by Liatheus



Category: Gintama
Genre: Gen, Gintama Zine Fic, Joui 4, Joui War, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Alternating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-18
Updated: 2018-05-18
Packaged: 2019-05-08 15:45:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14697312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liatheus/pseuds/Liatheus
Summary: Four Kings to hold up Heaven; four promises to hold them there.





	To Weld and Solder

**Author's Note:**

> I am pleased to present my fic and contribution to the Gintama Zine: A Samurai Heart! I highly recommend you go check out the other beautiful works in the zine at gintamazine.tumblr.com and show your love to all the artists and writers who made this amazing project possible<3 
> 
> Shout out to my fellow zine ficcers corvidity, unidentifiedpie, charmingstrangeness, and jackopancake for their comments, proofreading and general support throughout the writing process. You guys rock<3

_Tucked away in an old pouch, once-vibrant purple threads faded to mottled grey, slipped inside the inner lining of a kimono sleeve; locked at the bottom of a trunk, deep in the heart of a star-sailing ship._

It’s blinding.

He’s blind.

No, wait, that’s not right.

He still has one eye.

Heh.

He might as well be blind though—would rather be, if it would scour away the rage and pain and _Sensei, no, please no_ —

The bandages around the gaping hole in his face itch madly, madly enough that he’s sure he’s gone half-mad himself, giggling alone in the half-dark of the shamble they call the medical tent amongst the debris of their makeshift camp.

They’ve lost—everything—broken, the lot of them.

He doesn’t know where they are, his fellow disciples having bodily dragged him from the cliffs, their feet trampling hard through cracked, battle-scorched hills. The dim of the candlelight sends ugly shadows prowling over flimsy, patchwork sheets, ragged and stained with anonymous filth. Something glints at him.

A beast.

A beast with one eye.

He laughs, feels his own beast rise in greeting, howling against the bars of his ribcage.

Reaching out a crooked hand, he beckons it closer, grins when it slides over his fingers and into his palm. A beautiful beast, glowering at him in twists and gnarls of soot black and gunmetal grey, its single eye glowing gold-amber-red.

Maybe he can have it, erase the bloodstains with a new vision.

He presses his nail into the eye of the beast, pushes and pushes until it pops right out. Something half laughter, half agonised gasp spills from his throat, candleflame flickering against the force of his breath.

Rolling the eye between the rough pads of his thumb and forefinger, he holds it up to his face, right over where the bandages gather under forehead and above cheek. Through it, he sees the whole world burning to ash.

***

_Hanging over the twin ridges of a collarbone, down the soft swell of muscled chest and curving just below the sternum, hidden from sight beneath coat and scarf and shirt; resting warm against the pulse of a beating heart._

In the end, they don’t give him a choice.

You’re injured, Katsura says; you can’t fight, Takasugi says; send us saké, Gintoki says.

He pretends he doesn’t notice them huddling together, whispering and drawing and redrawing battle plans weeks in the making because they’re suddenly a general down.

Regret sits heavy in his chest; in the end, he goes because they’re his friends, and he would rather die a thousand times than devastate them with his death.

…which might be just a little ironic, but hey, it’s the thought that counts! Ahahaha!

Ha.

Routes are settled, supplies distributed, and he gets loaded into next morning’s cart with the rest of the too-injured men. He can’t decide whether or not to say goodbye, ends up having that choice taken from him too when alien guns sound over the forest canopy and the still-standing Kings rush to hold off the enemy without a backwards glance.

As the cart wheels trundle over loose pebbles, a light pressure bumps into his elbow; he raises his bandage-wrapped arm carefully, feels a weight down the fabric of his sleeve.

He rummages through the waves of cotton before managing to hook a finger around something cool and smooth. Pulling out his hand, he finds a thin ring made of twisting metal dangling from the joint of his finger, its dark grey coating glinting silver in the sunlight. It’s too big for his finger, too small to slip over his knuckles and onto his wrist, diameter less than the width of his palm.

He can’t figure out which one of those three punks had slipped it inside his sleeve—because who else would it be?—but he guesses it hardly matters, because he knows a gift when he sees one.

He closes his fingers over the ring, holds it to his chest.

Yeah, they’ll meet again—all of them—on this star fleck of a planet; after all, what kind of businessman would he be if he didn’t deliver a return gift?

One day. He’s sure of it.

***

_Threaded through silk looped around lacquered wood, polished sheath hand-carved by Time and War, sheltered from heat and light in a cupboard in a safehouse known only to one; protector of the heart of the sword._

He orders the retreat, then doubles back with his two fastest, abled men to scout the front lines. Hidden behind the curve of a hill, they watch the Amanto loiter in the small valley, pulling in metal wagons to collect their dead.

He wonders, not for the first time, what they do with the bodies, if they take them back to their planets, to families waiting in vain, if they bury them like humans do.

(Takasugi had sneered at him once, for asking the question out loud; Gintoki had been entirely uninterested, finger in his ear.)

The Amanto finally leave, and he and his men slip out from the bend and begin picking their way through the leftover human bodies. There’s no time today to dig graves; their company needs to be at the western beachfront in four days, ready to greet the new soldiers sailing in from Tosa.

Not a terrible loss this time, says his inner General; only twenty-one fatalities, the greater part of their army escaping with only minor flesh wounds thanks to the tactical advantage they had in the valley, close quarter combat leaving the Amanto unable to use their technology at the risk of hurting their own forces.

Still, there are dead gazing at him, so he goes, one by one, to each corpse, and closes their eyes, breathing each of them a silent prayer. Letting his men search pockets for identification papers and family heirlooms to be sent home, he moves further out, following the trail of blood Gintoki had splattered down a low incline.

A glimmer in the reddened grass catches his eye; he goes over, leans down, and finds—

A crow.

It’s vaguely familiar somehow, like something he’s seen in a flash of someone else’s memory. He runs a thumb over the crown of its head, along the line of a wing.

“Katsura-san!”

The call of his name jerks him from his reverie; he slips the crow into his pocket and climbs back up the slope, over his fallen comrades, back into the wake of war.

***

_Dropped in a desk drawer amid a mess of candy wraps and paper scraps and half-empty pens; a memory rather left in shadow, too sombre for the bright chaos of a one-bedroom apartment above a snack shop in the heart of a bustling city._

Katsura and Takasugi find him kneeling on the ground, wrists raw and bleeding into the hemp rope binding his arms behind his back. They’ve brought the officials, but it’s too late.

Shouyou is gone and the school is burning and there’s nothing they can do but watch as the place they called home crumbles to cinders.

In the morning, the officials leave with muttered condolences and empty notebooks; Gintoki is a no-name bastard, Katsura the orphaned son of a Bakufu traitor, Takasugi disowned—no one wants them, and no one will care if they die of cold or hunger.

The school has burnt down to nothing more than rocky mounds of blackened debris. They scavenge through the wreckage, fingers and feet darkening with soot and ash. None of them say anything when tears begin falling; the smoke still lingers, stinging their eyes.

Gintoki is knees-deep in the rubble when his hand knocks into something hard.

He brushes away the detritus to find a small metal box, only just as big as his palm, edges charred but all its corners holding together. As soon as he picks it up, the bottom falls off, and a long glint of metal-grey drops out, clinking lightly as it hits the ground.

There’s a rush of affection for that metal box; it’s done its job, protecting the precious thing inside and saving a piece of Shouyou from destruction.

He bends down and picks up the chain, cups it close to his chest before his fist closes hard around it, cutting a line into the flesh of his hand.

He is—they are—the three bad boys of Shoka Sonjuku: Gintoki who survived not knowing when his next meal will be, Katsura who walked with a straight back under his heavy coat of mourning, Takasugi who threw away an easy life to burnish his fragile, restless soul.

They are Shouyou’s disciples.

And Shouyou’s disciples protect their precious people.

It’s a promise.

***

The child is gazing at him curiously and he realises that he’s absentmindedly fiddling with his pendant again as they rest in a forest clearing, far from the main road.

Gintoki still hasn’t said a word beyond the single utterance of his name since being picked up from that corpse-littered plain, communicating in nods and head shakes and dull-eyed stares, with the occasional grunt.

It’s another two-week hike through mountain forests until they reach Yamaguchi Prefecture; Shouyou hopes that once they find somewhere to settle, somewhere quiet where the air smells clean, his little companion will feel safe enough to speak again.

He beckons the boy over; Gintoki inches closer.

“This is something very important to me,” he says, pulling the chain off his neck and holding the pendant out in his palm, “a reminder of the choices I’ve made, the choices I will make from now on.” He points to the three-legged crow flying in a ring of twisted metal, head turned to the side. “This is Yatagarasu, the crow god of guidance, will of the Heavens, and servant of the goddess Amaterasu.” He traces the ring with a finger, drawing out the sun and pointing to each of the god’s three legs as he goes. “The Heavens, the Earth, and humanity—see how they all stand together under the sun?”

Smiling at Gintoki’s look of concentration, Shouyou hands over the pendant and chain. Gintoki examines it carefully, tracing the sun as Shouyou did, then Yatagarasu himself, along the lengths of his wings, down each of his legs, over the curve of his beak and up to the etched lines of his face, poking his one visible eye.

“Ah, that’s rock crystal.” Gintoki tilts the pendant back and forth, the precious stone flashing silver-bright. “The jeweller who made this for me refused to use anything else for Yatagarasu’s eye, saying that a messenger of Heaven must always be able to see clear. Look, if you hold it this way, it shines with the colour of everything around it. Very pretty, don’t you think?”

Gintoki looks up from his inspection with shining eyes, and nods solemnly. Shouyou laughs, reaching out to pat the boy’s silver curls.

“When you grow older, I’ll give this to you,” he decides, “so Yatagarasu will always be watching over you. My precious little samurai.”

*

*

*

Out from the trunk, the shirt, the closet, the desk drawer; four men sit together around a scratched wooden table, four hearts beating together in the rising light of a new dawn.

“Oi, what are you doing?! You can’t use glue on it like that!”

“It’s not glue, it’s Katsura!”

“Ahahaha! Don’t worry, Kintoki! This is premium, grade-A glue that we use to fix the Kaientai!”

“Hm. Bansai, too, has used it to fix his sunglasses and headphones when I accidentally destroyed them.”

“No one asked you, runt! And all of you, shut up! We’re taking this to a professional jeweller, you hear me?!”

“Ah, Gintoki, I didn’t know you could be so generous. Well then, we’ll leave you to it.”

“Hm. Let us know when it’s done.”

“Ahahaha! Such good disciple you are, Kintoki! Call us if you need anything!”

“Oi! Who said that I’d be the one paying for everything? Guys? Guys!”

*

*

*

In the first autumn after a universe-shattering war, a school is rebuilt in a quiet field in a village deep in the rolling valleys near the Hagi capital. As the leaves turn gold-red and fall, young hands come knocking on new-oiled wood sliding open to reveal eyes bright and hopeful. By the time the first winter winds drift in, the classroom hums with the energy of fresh-faced students, the dojo resounding with the arrhythmic thunks of wooden swords whacking against each other.

High over the next generation of little samurai, perched on a hook beneath a sign proclaiming _Sugar Content_ in broad strokes, Yatagarasu watches.

 

_fin_

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading and please let me know what you think!<3


End file.
